Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: Disambiguation

Description

This book accompanies an exhibition at the White-Out Studio (Knokke-Heist) Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: Disambiguation consists of a box of 6 cahiers; each cahier shapes the perception of one exhibition - a recurring attempt at disambiguation. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is the protagonist of this serial. In six screenplays, the oblique shadow of her image comes to the fore, evoking an image that involuntarily traces the road that crosses borders and time. Against the background, shattered images grow like crooked branches, turning into a "thicket" - a collective noun, a "Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis", to be inhaled like one single retained gasp. The changing figure is always drawn against the same setting: the completely stripped display window of the White-Out Studio. This sort of periodical emptiness - which is both embodied in the blank pages of the cahier and the empty window from which it operates - comprises the space to put an impression of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on display. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is like a collection with a number of characters, plots and landscapes that disclose themselves to the public. Film sequences of non-expressive, constructed images.
In each cahier, we achieve saturation as such, the neutral joiner that binds all self-contained ambiguities. The apparent absence of the main character and the emptiness of the setting turn each "Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis" into a variation on the same playful "disambiguity" - as in a reversal of the ambiguous. A continuous, drifting state of (dis)ambiguity.

About Author

Jan De Cock is a contemporary Belgian visual artist who was educated in both Ghent and Brussels. De Cock entered the 2003 Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge ("Prize for Young Belgian Painters")competition. The artist is the first living Belgium artist to get an exhibition in MoMA. He is also only the second Belgian artist to have an exhibition in Tate Modern after Luc Tuymans. Jan De Cock is characteristically known to create large structures which refer to early modernist and suprematist sculpture and architecture. The artist likes to search for specific locations to make temporary installations, sometimes combined with the historical artwork present at the spot. He focuses on the interaction between space, work and the visitor.